I finished five books and one magazine this week.

1. Monday Mob, by Don Pendleton — The 33rd book in Pendleton’s highly successful series about Mack Bolan, the Executioner, kicks off a Hell Week as the warrior brings his special brand of destruction to the Mafia before retiring from that war to tackle a different threat to the nation. His target this time is the mob effort to reconstitute itself in the Midwest, centered on Chicago (though the action takes place in Indiana). This is a reasonably entertaining entry in the series, though the action feels a bit rushed and some of the setup for a new federal agent ally not as smoothly integrated as one might like. Recommended for fans, but not the place to start.
2. Six-Gun Bride of the Teton Bunch and Seven Other Action-Packed Stories of the Wild West, by Les Savage, Jr., edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini — Les Savage, Jr., wrote quite a few western and northern stories in his short life, and this collection brings together eight of them. All are worth a look, though I didn’t enjoy them all equally. Perhaps the most memorable is the first in this collection, King of the Buckskin Breed, a novelette first published in the November 1951 issue of .44 Western Magazine, in which a man who has been forced to take refuge in the wilds as a fugitive finds out what he really values when he leads a pack train through dangerous territory. Recommended.
3. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler — Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe novel is a well-paced mystery that keeps the reader guessing as to what is going on. There are several differences from the excellent film version starring Humphrey Bogart, but both are worth your time. Recommended.
4. The Kingis Quair and The Quare of Jelusy, by James I of Scotland — Scotland’s ill-fated King James I, who suffered a lengthy imprisonment in the power of the English kings Henry IV, V, and VI, and then later had his reign cut short at the hands of assassins, was nevertheless fortunate in his bride, English noblewoman Joan Beaufort. His Chaucer- and Boethius-influenced Kingis Quair is a pleasing dream vision poem that fans of late-medieval poetry will likely enjoy. The volume that I read also contained a brief poem on good counsel and in addition The Quare of Jelusy, a poem (perhaps influenced by The Kingis Quair) in which an anonymous narrator, moved by a lady’s laments, discourses at length on jealousy and its evils. It’s a lesser work but may be of some interest.
5. The Curse of the Two-Headed Bull, by Lee Falk, adapted by Carson Bingham — The luck-giving idol of the Llongo tribe has been stolen, and it is up to the Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, to get it back. He pursues the missing object to London, even as the body count that seems attributable to the curse on anyone outside the tribe handling the statue continues to climb. In an effort to be helpful, Diana does some investigating on her own, and the outcome of her inquiries makes matters even more urgent for the Phantom. As with all the novels I’ve read in this series, the book moves along at a good clip with action that maintains interest. The ambiguity of the idol’s powers is a good touch of the weird. Recommended.

I also continued with the three books that I will be reading throughout the next several months or the whole year:

1. A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, by humorist Irvin S. Cobb — a collection of 366 amusing anecdotes published in 1923 (100 years ago!), which I’ll be reading at the rate of one per day.
2. More Heart Throbs — the sequel to the similar Heart Throbs, an anthology of prose and verse selections, often sentimental in nature, submitted by the general public and famous people, published in 1911; I’ll be reading one or more pages (as needed for the selections) per day throughout the year.
3. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, translated by Sir Richard F. Burton in the late 19th century — I hope to read all ten volumes as well as the six supplemental volumes this year.

On the periodical front, I finished up issue #3 (Spring 2021) of Whetsone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery, which I found moderately entertaining overall, although the stories are largely unmemorable. Three issues into reading this magazine (there are now six available), I’m glad it exists, but as I’ve often seen in other newer writing as well, there seems to have been insufficient editing to fix problems in the writing (repetition, inconsistency, etc.) or even just to correct typos and incorrect word choices.